A New Year's Day meme. I did this last year and it turned out to be a pretty good year, maybe it will work again. Feel free to steal and modify it.
1. What did you do in 2012 that you’d never done before?
Published an article in a non-science journal. Created a book club. Ate zucchini, hazlenut chocolate cake while looking at the Julian Alps.
2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't know what I said I would do last year and, doubtless, I didn't do it. This year I will write my dissertation and defend it. That is the one and only plan I am making.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes, a friend in the midwest.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Parents of childhood friends and a remarkable Prof in my PhD program.
5. What countries did you visit?
England, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy.
6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?
A PhD. A salary. Hair on the top of my head, but let's be reasonable.
7. What dates from 2012 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
My 50th birthday. Well, because it was my 50th and the Ragazzo got really sick, and 20 children lost their lives in CT. It couldn't quite be called joyous.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Reaching 50, I guess, although all I did was look before I cross, buckle in, and take my vitamins.
9. What was your biggest failure?
I said this last year but I'm not sure that I improved: I talked more than I listened. I answered more than I asked.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Aside from a rotten sinus infection, and an annoying stomach thing, I was pretty fortunate.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
I got a great tie and scarf in Vienna and saw a lot of terrific theatre performances.
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
President Obama stood up for gay marriage in an election year. How the world has changed.
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Is it too much of a cliche to say most of the United States legislature?
14. Where did most of your money go?
To living in New York, but I wouldn't say that it's not worth it. You don't get something for nothing.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Obama's standing up for gay marriage. Our train trip to Slovenia. Cute puppies. Seeing the play Scenes From an Execution after imagining it for 25 years. The Halloween party we did at work for the kids two days after Hurricane Sandy. A meeting that I had regarding future work. Seeing a number of my old students perform.
16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
None comes to mind.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder?
b) thinner or fatter?
c) richer or poorer?
- you don't say in what, so if we're not counting dollars and cents, definitely richer.
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Had meaningful exchanges with friends, family, and new acquaintances. Written. Followed through.
19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Acted without awareness. Made commitments I couldn't keep.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
At the in-laws making schnitzel, cucumber salad, opening presents with the kids, and singing carols.
21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Once or twice.
22. How many one-night stands?
None, thanks for asking.
23. What was your favourite TV program?
The BBC adaptations of
A Dance to the Music of Time and
Daniel Deronda were both very good
.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Yes, and I'm much better at it.
27. What did you want and get?
A more unified experience of myself.
28. What did you want and not get?
Although gay people can now marry in nine of the United States and D.C., the federal government does not confer more than 1,000 benefits upon us that it gives straight people who have paid the same fee and sworn to the same terms of that contract.
29. What were your favourite performances this year?
Films:
Margaret (2011)
Another Year (2010) - appropriately enough
Blue Valentine (2010)
This is Not a Film (2011)
Copie Conforme (2010)
Red Riding Trilogy (2009)
Theatre:
Uncle Vanya by the Sydney Theatre Co. w/ Cate Blanchette
Orpheus and Euridice chor. Pina Bausch by Paris Opera Ballet
Scenes From an Execution - Nat'l Theatre, London
Timon of Athens - Nat'l Theatre, London (HD simulcast)
Donka: A Letter to Chekhov - BAM
The Other Place - Broadway w/ Laurie Metcalf
30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I worked, went to a very elegant restaurant and turned 50.
31.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Equal treatment under the law, as detailed in #28.
32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
I manage to get dressed every day, occasionally that included a tie. Fashion concept? Let's not go crazy.
33. What kept you sane?
Did something keep me sane? If so, it was probably the Ragazzo.
34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Where do I begin? I am appalled at the resistance to offering healthcare as a basic right of citizenship in this rich and technically advanced country. I am amazed that when so many people are murdered in cold blood all some can think about is their personal right to own a gun. I am terrified that Antonin Scalia actually imagines that he or anyone else interprets the Constitution
exactly as it was written. We would still have slavery and women would not be able to vote if that were the case. I continue to be amazed that relatively smart people imagine that the only thing between them and better lives is government. They are in denial about how reliant we all are upon each other for basic services. If they want electricity coming to their homes, trash collected, safe meat and dairy to eat, coordinated help after hurricanes, relatively safe household products, we need to have regulation and we need to pay taxes. Making everything answerable only to profit has been disastrous for so many industries - look at the airlines, health insurance, for-profit prisons are a true
desecration of justice.
35. Whom did you miss?
My dad. My grandparents.
36. Who was the best new person you met?
I met a really cool woman at a wedding two days ago who works on biodiversity in cities.
37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
I worked on being more mindful of things as they are.
38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This doesn't sum up my year, but I think Noel Coward is as good a way as any to ring in the New Year.
Quite for no reason
I'm here for the Season
And high as a kite,
Living in error
With Maud at Cap Ferrat
Which couldn't be right.
Everyone's here and frightfully gay,
Nobody cares what people say,
Though the Riviera
Seems really much queerer
Than Rome at it's height,
Yesterday night-
I went to a marvelous party
With Nounou and Nada and Nell,
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed as we were
Which was Hell.
Poor Grace started singing at midnight
And didn't stop singing till four;
We knew the excitement was bound to begin
When Laura got blind on Dubonnet and gin
And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin,
I couldn't have liked it more.
I went to a marvelous party,
I must say the fun was intense,
We all had to do
What the people we knew
Would be doing a hundred years hence.
Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour,
Some shells and a black feather boa,
Poor Millicent wore a surrealist comb
Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter's in Rome,
But the weight was so great that she had to go home,
I couldn't have liked it more.
People's behaviour
Away from Belgravia
Would make you aghast,
So much variety
Watching society
Scampering past,
If you have any mind at all
Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall
Seems pretty flimsy,
No more than a whimsy,
By way of contrast
On Saturday last-
I went to a marvelous party,
We didn't start dinner till ten
And young Bobbie Carr
Did a stunt at the bar
With a lot of extraordinary men;
Dear Baba arrived with a turtle
Which shattered us all to the core,
The Grand Duke was dancing a foxtrot with me
When suddenly Cyril screamed "Fiddledidee"
And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea,
I couldn't have liked it more.
I went to a marvelous party,
Elise made an entrance with May
You'd never have guessed
From her fisherman's vest
That her bust had been whittled away.
Poor Lulu got fried on Chianti
And talked about esprit de corps.
Maurice made a couple of passes at Gus
And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss,
Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss,
I couldn't have liked it more.
I went to a marvellous party.
We played the most wonderful game,
Maureen disappeared
And came back in a beard
And we all had to guess at her name!
We talked about growing old gracefully
And Elsie who's seventy-four
Said, "A, it's a question of being sincere,
And B, if you're supple you've nothing to fear."
Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier,
I couldn't have liked it more.
Bernard MacLaverty's Cal - 150 pages that are as densely packed with passion and tension as any I've read in Dostoyevsky or Hardy. The 19-year-old title character lives in Northern Ireland. A Roman Catholic, he is hounded and physically attacked by the Protestant Orangemen. His friends have joined the IRA in response to the violence with which they are threatened. Cal finds the violence too much for him. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people. This book is about the converging of conflicts political and personal - the political and religious struggles of an oppressed people, a first great passionate love, and the dilemmas of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager as he makes the moral choices that are going to shape his whole life. I felt deeply the greatness of these struggles as I read. Read my full rave here.
This book has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing. It is pitch-perfect on the a fast-paced, ostentatious, brutal beauty of Rome. Lambert's writing is rich with observations both interior and exterior that imbue character and place with clarity and instantaneous complexity. This novel, though entertaining to read, is an unambiguous critique of the moral hypocrisy that infects the powerful and the nature of crime which combines an abuse of power with the dehumanization of innocent people. Read my full rave here.
Molly Fox is a celebrated actress - a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' It is her profession to create characters from that knowledge through the medium of her self. Yet, when it comes to letting others truly know her, she does not. 'Can we ever know another?', this novel asks. The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book on this potentially abstract musing that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor and writer to reflect on the ways we can inhabit the inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your reading of this book. This book is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. Read my full rave here.
The struggle to keep the champagne bubbling when it's gone flat is the action filling Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire Vile Bodies. Stephen Fry's brilliant film adaptation, Bright Young Things released in 2003 captures the feel of a breathless, manic party. Jim Broadbent, Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James Mcavoy, Imelda Stuanton, and Fenella Woolgar are some of the beautifully cast actors who maintain an understated hysteria, if you can imagine understated hysteria. The love that director and cast have for these characters is what impresses me the most. It would be so easy to show us how vile these people are - how silly, how louche, how fey - but instead they love them to death. Raveworthy. Read my full rave here.
Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway . I opened this book last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment. In it Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating. When we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins to reclaim herself. The story is full of perfectly wrought descriptions, complex observations of human pain and fantasy, and cogent storytelling. Read my full rave here.
